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Original Content at https://www.opednews.com/articles/Lesser-Evils-Psychoses-a-by-Kevin-Gosztola-080808-631.html (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). |
August 8, 2008
Lesser Evils, Psychoses, and the Perils of Voting Your Conscience [Part 1]
By Kevin Gosztola
The current attitude of Americans towards third party and Independent presidential candidates has led to much discussion here on OpEdNews. This first part continues the discussion by looking at the "Lesser Evils" in this election.
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*The current attitude of Americans towards third party and Independent presidential candidates has led to much discussion here on OpEdNews. Much of the discussion was sparked thanks to Rob Kall’s article, “Will Progressives, with their No Difference and Lesser of Two Evils Psychoses, Give McCain the Election?” J.C. Garrett published an article that was headlined like Rob’s, which was called simply, “Lesser Evils.”
In favor of keeping the discussion alive (because it is a healthy one), I would like to not simply skim over all the articles and put together one article to address everything said in 2 or 3 pages.
I have written Part 1 to examine deeply what J.C. Garrett wrote. I will publish a Part 2 and a Part 3 later to deal with other writings I have come across.
Each will be linked so those who are not regulars to OpEdNews can become part of this important conversation. In fact, I hope if you enjoy talking about the role of third parties or Independent candidates in politics you will post comments and/or join the OpEdNews community.
Garrett writes in his article, “Lesser Evils”:
Every generation automatically believes they are experiencing current events that are new and novel. Because this is the first time they have experienced them, it causes the misperception that the events themselves are occurring for the first time. But people have been choosing the lesser evil since the very dawn of man. It is also the best way - indeed the only way - to make responsible decisions, not only in a political contest but in our everyday lives.
This comment is grossly ignorant of history. People have not been choosing the lesser evil since the very dawn of man. In the 20th century, voters chose to vote for third party candidates in many elections. Eugene V. Debs, former president Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette, Strom Thurmond, Henry Wallace, and the three most successful third party candidates in our nation’s history, George Wallace, John Anderson, and Ross Perot, all changed the complexion of past elections and have played a part in making it possible for candidates like Bernie Sanders, Jesse Ventura, Angus King, Lowell Weicker, Walter Hickel, and Joe Lieberman to run as independents in congressional and gubernatorial elections.
But before I get deep into a history lesson, let’s look at Mr. Garrett’s construct for his reasoning on "lesser evils":
The simple reason for [always selecting lesser evils since the dawn of man] is that no human is devoid of evil. We all have living within us the capacity for committing monstrously evil acts depending upon the circumstances. Most of us cannot know with absolute certainty how we will respond in any given situation that we have not already experienced personally. We tell ourselves we do, but we all know it's only a lie we tell ourselves to feel better.
Under this concept, Garrett rightfully admits that all people are capable of committing evil acts. Like Lord Acton said, “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Since we cannot know precisely what we, ourselves, would do in certain circumstances, it is impossible to predict with certainty how another would act. That leaves us with only past conduct and personal perceptions to rely on when choosing the lesser evil.
Garrett contradicts himself by saying it is impossible to predict with certainty how one would act and then suggesting that we can judge which candidate is the lesser evil by using personal perceptions.
Wouldn’t predictions be based on personal perceptions? If so, that leaves we the people with past conduct and only past conduct to discern what one may or may not do in office. Past conduct is all we have to make the right decision, one that gets the true lesser evil in office instead of the more evil than the lesser evil.
With one contradiction, Garrett has now laid the foundations of what will be used to show Americans who they are required to vote for if they wish to keep evil from continuing in our nation’s name.
However, there's one small problem that I do not know Garrett knows exists if we follow his "lesser evils" construct.
This foundation of his argument makes predictions that McCain would ruin the Supreme Court, unions, science, ignore global warming, forget the poor and unemployed, maintain the gap between rich and poor, poorly address taxes, trash social security, and more baseless. Unless substantiated with stories of past conduct, humans, under Garrett’s construct, are incapable of perceiving what one may do and so how can one know McCain would do such things?
Likewise, right wingers cannot suggest Obama will usher in an age of socialism, let the terrorists attack us, prevent America from addressing the energy crisis, or whatever else they claim might happen without supporting such thinking with evidence, which would be past conduct, that would lead one to believe Obama would continue to conduct himself in such a matter that would cause such events to happen while president.
Garrett reasonably describes how “lesser evil” does not mean Barack Obama is evil. He doesn’t suggest that “lesser evil” applies to John McCain too, but I will because both men, under Garrett’s construct, are capable of evil. If they are both capable of evil, couldn’t they both be capable of “lesser evil?”
Garrett continues and explains how Obama is not evil; he just is capable of taking political positions that are evil. He doesn’t apply this to John McCain, but let’s be fair---John McCain is not evil but capable of taking political positions that are evil.
Only one of two people will be elected this year, and only one is the lesser of two evils. If you throw your vote away on a third party candidate with no chance of winning, you will make absolutely no difference for whatever issues you care about. Your vote will not count for anything at all except helping to elect someone who is a thousand times less receptive and supportive of your ideas and the nation's needs than Obama.
Looks like it’s time to return to the history lesson because third party candidates can make a difference for whatever issues Americans care about and three third party candidates (Wallace, Anderson, Perot) did in fact make a difference on issues Americans cared about by challenging the two-party system during the 20th century.
Douglas Schoen, in a chapter titled, “The Historical Significance of Third-Party Candidates,” from his book Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System outlines how Wallace, Anderson, and Perot have all had a “distinct impact on the direction of the country.” From page 48 of Schoen’s book:
George Wallace was in large part responsible for whites moving away from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and for the creation of the “silent majority” popularized by Nixon’s campaign, with its emphasis on law and order and traditional values.
John Anderson helped bring the environmental movement into the political mainstream and developed new ideas to address the energy crises that faced America; he also advocated fiscal discipline and fiscal prudence.
Ross Perot was perhaps the most influential political hopeful of the 1990s; he was largely responsible for the balanced budget, a newfound respect for fiscal discipline, and ultimately, budget surpluses.
Garrett proceeds to make the claim that “Obama is the lesser evil” under the construct that he has created because “his positions and past conduct are less evil than McCain's.
Such a claim that Obama is less evil than McCain is only as good as the case that is made under Mr. Garrett’s construct. What evidence does Garrett have to offer to prove that Obama is the “lesser evil”?
Garrett suggests that Obama was against the Iraq war because it was “an unprovoked war with a country that posed no threat to us” and so “he wants to end that war.” McCain, on the other hand, “cheerleads for another century of death and destruction, another 100 years of bullets and bombs and blood, another 10 decades of deficits and dollar devaluation.”
On the contrary, a recent Slate article has an equation that shows that Obama and McCain are not thinking much differently on Iraq anymore.
And isn’t Obama cheerleading for “another century of death and destruction, another 100 years of bullets and bombs and blood, another 10 decades of deficits and dollar devaluation” by wanting to end a war while tacitly supporting the expansion of two wars with Pakistan and Afghanistan?
Garrett describes Obama as being a “lesser evil” since he offers direct diplomacy in contrast to McCain’s policy of confrontation and isolation.
Obama is selling his solution to our nation’s foreign policy dilemmas as direct diplomacy, but is direct diplomacy what we can expect from an Obama administration?
Past conduct is difficult to use here since Obama lacks foreign policy experience unlike McCain. He has served on the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate since being elected in 2004. So, perhaps, it’s best that we use Obama’s foreign policy advisers when making predictions about what might happen?
A New York Times article includes the following in regards to Obama’s foreign policy team:
Most of the core members of his team served in government during President Bill Clinton’s administration and by and large were junior to the advisers who worked on Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic nomination. But they remain in charge within the campaign even as it takes on more senior figures from the Clinton era, like two former secretaries of state, Madeleine K. Albright and Warren Christopher, and are positioned to put their own stamp on the party’s foreign policy.
Will we see Madeleine K. Albright using the carrots of engagement and the sticks of sanctions to solve current U.S. foreign policy dilemmas? Will we see Warren Christopher create a multinational coalition to combat terrorism like Bush did, a move Christopher praised less than one year after 9/11?
Will both repeat history and rely on sanctions that kill thousands of children? Albright did think the “price was worth it” when half a million children died as a result of sanctions on Iraq.
With Albright and Christopher on the team, and with Zbigniew Brzezinski being pushed out of his team due to positions that upset AIPAC, it is my belief that based on past conduct we can expect a team that is reliant on Big Stick Diplomacy, a form of hegemony that was made popular by Theodore Roosevelt when he was president.
Big Stick Diplomacy is waged with the belief that a nation has the right to oppose other nation’s actions. It also is waged with the belief that a nation has the right to intervene economically and militarily in domestic affairs of other countries if they pose a threat to peace or sovereignty.
When examining what has been put together to take on the challenges of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, there is a huge change Obama will be offering Big Stick Diplomacy as a significant part of his foreign policy if elected.
If Big Stick Diplomacy is what he will offer to the world, I challenge people to describe the differences between Big Stick Diplomacy and confrontation/isolation policies favored by McCain in a way that would convince me one is worth being voted for over the other.
Garrett proceeds to examine the differences between McCain and Obama on domestic policy. But, health care and tax cuts cannot be taken care of if we continue the “war on terror” and keep the bloated military budget. Obama has no problem with expanding our military budget, according to The Progressive:
Sen. Barack Obama is forsaking the position of most African-Americans on the issue of ever-escalating U.S. military spending. And progressive black leaders are letting him get away with it.
For decades, Black America has maintained a general consensus in favor of “butter” in the national “butter or bullets” debate. The call for a “Marshall Plan” to rebuild America’s cities has been a constant in African-American public discourse, inevitably coupled with demands for lower military spending.
The collapse of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty under a tsunami of Vietnam expenditures proved that war spells the death of urban domestic dreams.
Now, however, for the first time since World War II, we witness a self-imposed silence on war spending among a number of black opinion-molders who would be shouting their heads off at the prospect of an even larger U.S. military establishment. The reason for this voluntary stand-down: Barack Obama supports the addition of nearly 100,000 soldiers and Marines in coming years, and he doesn’t want to be embarrassed by loud black voices of protest during his dash for the brass ring.
“I strongly support the expansion of our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the Army and 27,000 Marines,” Obama told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs last April.
That’s precisely the number favored by President Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates over a five-year period at a cost of $108 billion, as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office. Sen. Hillary Clinton would add at least 80,000 troops, Rudy Giuliani wants 70,000 additional pairs of boots on the ground, somewhere on the planet, and Mitt Romney would add 100,000.
To what purpose? Both Republicans and front-running Democrats claim to be aiming for dramatically lower U.S. troop numbers in Iraq, over varying, vague spaces of time. Where will the new troops be deployed? A central lesson of human history is that armies are raised in order to be sent somewhere.
Obama, the Great Black Hope (and, apparently, a Great Hope for many whites who consider themselves anti-war), cannot plausibly claim the “peace candidate” mantle while simultaneously serving as a member in good standing of the club that lobbies for ever-increasing military budgets.
Obama has definitively chosen guns over bread, bullets over butter. The money is already earmarked for the generals and admirals and defense contractors, with his signature prominently affixed.
In a sense, the election is over, since all the “viable” candidates are members of the Military Spending Club. None of Clinton’s or Obama’s promises for urban revitalization, infrastructure repair, real health care reform, vastly increased federal aid to schools or affordable housing can be taken seriously so long as they support a bloated Pentagon.
Garret expresses his "feeling that Obama will work with the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress he will have during his first term to correct the FISA mistake and several other Bush-era edicts.”
Under Garrett’s construct, however, it doesn’t matter how one might feel. What matters is past conduct. And past conduct shows Obama finds it politically expedient to forsake the Consitution and specifically, the Fourth Amendment.
In this case, it's not really even about choosing the lesser evil because Obama has such a stellar record. It's more about not getting your first choice. If you were a Hillary supporter, or if you wish Dennis Kucinich could win, or Ron Paul, or Cynthia McKinney, or Bob Barr - there's not much to complain about in Obama. People are upset that their preferred candidate cannot win, and yet they would waste their vote because they can't have their first choice. They would risk everything that could happen in a Bush third term because they can't have their way, exactly the way they want it. Like a child throwing a tantrum because Mommy said he couldn't get the big bag of Cheetos and has to settle for the small bag. Instead of being reasonable and accepting the small bag, he ends up getting nothing for acting like a spoiled brat.
The Bush administration was a perfect storm that happened because the right people from the right background who had been working together on the right and laying the groundwork for the future were all brought into this administration. Neither McCain nor Obama will have the same people the Bush administration had, which gave Bush the power to roll back liberty and fight terrorists in the name of so-called freedom.
Whether a third term of Bush happens does not rest on electing McCain or Obama but rather it rests on whether or not either candidate will find it politically expedient to reject the “war on terror”, end it, and reverse Middle East policy.
As for the Cheetos, Americans haven’t been able to eat Cheetos for eight years now and are hungry so a big bag is more appealing than a small bag. It’s especially appealing because the large bag is on sale right now for 99 cents and costs less per ounce than the small bag.
Americans have been settling for the small bag for far too long. Each election they settle for one. But, when they don’t get any more Cheetos in between elections, it gets more and more difficult to settle for a small one during elections.
Mr. Garrett brings his essay to a close by exclaiming that if people vote third party or Independent (somebody who “can’t win”) his “family will have to face the horrors of nuclear war, an expanded fascist police state, and a government that is more controlled by huge corporations and special interest lobbyists than ever before” and it will “cost Obama the election and gave John McCain the keys to the White House and nuclear launch codes.”
Such fearmongering does not work because he set up a “lesser evils” argument that personal perceptions are not a good enough indication of how we or another might act.
Only past conduct can be used to determine what kind of a "lesser evils" candidate McCain or Obama really is.
McCain has been anti-torture, he challenged Boeing and the bloated military budget, and worked for campaign finance reform, and his past conduct indicates he could strengthen international law and work on nuclear non-proliferation effectively since he co-sponsored the Iran-Iraq Non-Proliferation Act with Al Gore.
Seems like McCain couldn't be that bad. But, I think in order for Garrett's argument to work he has to be that bad or else the "lesser evils" argument is weak.
Right now, McCain is foaming at the mouth with rhetoric to wet the appetites of the voters he expects to elect him. Who knows if he really agrees with what he is saying? He’s playing the game of politics.
The same goes for Obama. People have said he’s just saying that to get elected. Is he? Is there any way to know? Shouldn’t we find out before we get stuck with him for four years?
And if Obama can say whatever he wants to get elected, don't we have to afford McCain the same privilege?
Garrett closes his essay by posing a conundrum and asking people to figure out how they would solve a life or death situation where they had a choice between a young doctor (Obama) and an old doctor (McCain). The old doctor will most certainly kill you because the old doctor has had four malpractice suits. The young doctor is inexperienced but never has committed an error. People have to pick between the two because the doctor who you thought would perform your surgery is out of town.
I have some questions about this scenario.
Does the hospital ask me what surgeon I want to perform surgery? I had surgery recently Mr. Garrett and nobody came to me with a menu of options and said, “Pick one.”
Is it possible to just leave the hospital? May I head to the nearest hospital with the hopes that this hospital doesn’t let doctors with four malpractice lawsuits on their record continue to perform surgery?
And finally, busting out of this farcical scenario, is this election really a matter of life or death? And do you really want to convince people to vote for Obama because it is a matter of life or death? Would you like to continue the “either your with us or against us” mentality by getting people to believe this election is all about national security, an issue that is conflated by the media and one that McCain is stronger on than Obama due to past conduct or experience?
Is anybody really in danger of dying under McCain more so than Obama? Both support war for empire.
Obama surrounds himself with people from hedge funds, hedge funds that have had a hand in the home foreclosure crisis. People who become homeless could die. Obama also supported a bankruptcy bill that helped credit card companies and made it difficult for people to file for bankruptcy. So, based on past conduct, what happens when he is in office? Couldn’t he turn a blind eye to the needs of the people and offer a pro-credit card company or pro-hedge fund solution that ends up leading to the deaths of Americans who are unable to find another home or recover from bankruptcy?
Both side with corporate and special interests. Both pose dangers to America's future because the people nominated the "most viable" over the "best candidate."
Obama may be the best viable candidate in decades, but is that a good thing?
When we think of what positions a candidate has to have to be "viable", doesn't the fact that Obama is "viable" in the same way McCain is "viable" bother us Americans?
Part 2 and Part 3 coming soon.